Calls for a new global currency
In the context of the present worldwide economic crisis the calls for a new global currency are emerging from a variety of different and significant sources.
The main article (below) was first publised on 22/03/09.
Since the Second World War and the American-backed reconstruction of Europe, the mighty US dollar has been the world's dominant reserve currency and the principle means of exchange in international oil markets. However, the dollar's status has been both attacked and undermined by countries hostile to the USA's hegemony and the global banking crisis respectively. Meanwhile the emergence of the Euro created a stimulus and model for those so minded in other parts of the world to explore new common currencies.
In South America the 'Unasur' is consolidating as an EU-style union, with a common currency in prospect. In June 2008 Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in a radio broadcast:
“Many things still haven’t been realised. We are now going to create a Bank of South America. We are going to move forward so in the future we’ll have a single central bank, a common currency.”
In North America there have been rumblings for a number of years concerning the creation of a North American currency which would replace the US and Canadian dollars, and possible embrace Mexico also. An article in a national Canadian newspaper, the Financial Post, last year referred to the amero, not as a theoretical idea or conspiracy theory, but as a potential reality. The article laid out the process to be undertaken before the adoption of a continental currency known as the Amero.
And there are plans for a west Africa common currency to be launched on 1 December, 2009.
Last week there was a flurry of calls from all around the globe. An article in the Japan Times carried a report from a sem-governmental think tank which advised that Japan should take political initiatives to achieve an Asian monetary unification in the 2030s that supplements, if not replaces, the current (fragile) international economic and financial system. The report by the Institute for International Policy stated that the U.S. alone can no longer resolve the current global economic crisis. The authors further suggested that the creation of an open, multilayered international economic and financial system is vital to ensure stable, sustainable development of the world economy.
The nations that make up Scandinavia are some of the most ardent in Europe about abstaining from joining the common European currency. But Finland’s Minister of Sport and Culture, Stefan Wallin, recently wrote an article in the regional newspaper Turun Sanomat stating that he feels a Nordic region with a single currency would be better positioned to weather global economic turmoil.
Meanwhile Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev has called for the creation of a single world currency called the “acmetal” as a means of combating the worsening global financial crisis. Quoted in the China Post and speaking a day before a major economic conference opened in his Central Asian country, he said: “In our view, we must create a single world currency under the aegis of the United Nations.” He continued: “We must make a transition to an absolutely new global currency system based on legitimacy and, in view of all countries, one single monetary system,” he told a meeting of the Eurasian Association of Universities.
Now, in advance of the April G20 summit Russia is joining in by proposing the creation of a new reserve currency, to be issued by international financial institutions. This call is detailed among other measures in the text of its proposals to the forthcoming summit in London on 2 April.
Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of a UN panel of experts, has said that the proposal was to create something like the old European Currency Unit, that was a hard-traded, weighted basket.
A Russian source said Moscow was aware that the emergence of the new global currency would not happen overnight and said its goal was to initiate a discussion about it at the summit. The source is reported to have said India did not object to the discussion but was not prepared to take the lead. The source said South Korea and South Africa backed the idea, while developed nations were not "allergic" to it. "We are not waiting for everyone to say, 'How beautifully it has all been formulated, let's subscribe to it,'" the source said. "The main idea is to start a discussion about it."
This is all playing into the hands of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has been working assiduously to swing oil trading away from the dollar. Earlier this month (March 2009) he proposed creating a single currency for the 10-member nations of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) as a way to deal with the growing global financial crisis. Ahmadinejad made the suggestion at the 10th ECO summit in Tehran, which recently. He is currently serving a turn as the rotating president of ECO having taken over the role from his Azerbaijan counterpart.
It seems he, and other ECO member nation heads favour developing a single currency that would be used among the ECO member nations in exchanges among those states and with their neighbouring countries. They also proposed developing a joint trade bank. Both measures, he said, would help ECO member nations in the current global economic downturn.
A report stated that with a combined population of 400 million people, if ECO member nations adopt a single currency it could have a significant impact on the world economy. It appears from the figures supplied there are 491 million people living in the 27 member states of the European Union using the Euro as a common currency. And, although many other nations around the world accept the U.S. dollar, the population of the United States is 306 million, which is less than that of the population of either the ECO or EU member nations.
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Comment:
It will come as no surprise to those who have an understanding of God's prophetic word that the closer the world gets to the return of Jesus Christ, so too will the God-hating Babylonian system coalesce into a global alliance. It is not the duty of Christians to be obsessed or upset by these developments, but neither are followers of Christ given any licence to be ignorant of the Word of God and the way that this world is heading (Luke 12:54 -57).
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